Don’t Buy Arbitrage Conspiracy!

Dec 15th Update: I’ve added who I think you should buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy through IF you are planning to buy it. If you read about his Arbitrage Conspiracy bonuses I think it will be clear why I’m recommending you buy through him.

Dec 14th Update: Based on some feedback I got from Mike below I feel the need to point out that I was NOT at the Arbitrage Conspiracy event – so the best use of this information is to make sure that the things I mention are covered in the course – and if you DO buy the course to get the best bonuses as I suggest at the end.

Basically – take this with a grain of salt…but I suggest you read it AND read the feedback which gives a useful and different perspective.

ALSO, one of my main mentors – Nikhil Parekh - someone who is brilliant at marketing and who’s opinion I value extremely highly DOES recommend the course, although I wish he was giving bonuses as if you bought through him I’m sure he would have extremely helpful bonuses.

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Update Dec 15, 2008: IF you ARE going to buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy I would recommend you buy it through James Schramko and get his important bonuses here:

One last thing: James has worked closely with BOTH Aymen AND Nikhil so I really would be stunned if you there would be a better person for you to hook up with him.

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So with that out of the way, here was my original opinion based on what limited information was available:

I’m going to tell you right now that you should NOT buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy – unless you are already a very experienced marketer – and even THEN you’ll understand after reading this information why you probably STILL should not buy The Arbitrage Conspiracy.

There are extremely experienced marketer’s like Jerry West telling people not to by the Arbitrage Conspiracy product and even told the guys at John Cow: ‘Don’t get sucked into the hype. It isn’t real. I was there and I walked out after 40 minutes because the material was very basic.’

That’s interesting – because if they do NOT cover one VITAL aspect of running CPA marketing – and that is keeping track of a huge inventory of CPA offer start and end dates and having an automatic way of starting a new offer when one expires you are going to go completely nuts.

My business partner and I run CPA offer through a large number of organic sites and we use an open source ad-serving solution called OpenX.org to manage that type of thing – although there are also commercial ad serving services like AdJuggler, AdSpeed, and AdButler to name a few.

One thing I don’t agree with is that selling the course will bring about too much competition for the owners – that was something Charles Heflin from SEO2020 was saying. But the truth is that the amount of viable traffic for CPA offers is just enormous – and even if you use the ONE rudimentary trick of using domains as keywords they “revealed” (um, that trick has been revealed MANY times over the past several years – including by ME. LOL) there are SO many ways to go about finding them that even in ONE market you could have hundreds of people “playing well” together – and there are man, many markets where CPA offers are findable – PLUS if you really want to you can work out deals with businesses in markets where they are NOT common.

So in my opinion all of this noise about “If it’s so profitable why are they selling it?” is nonsense.

BUT I would also point out that certain CPA tricks are MUCH harder for people NEWER to PPC to pull off.

For example – I one ran a test on the “domains as keywords” technique on Adwords and discovered that often the NEWER advertisers are kind of screwed. Here’s what I did:

I had a friend of mine who had advertised minimally on Adwords for about a year put in the EXACT Ad, Exact Offer, and Exact Keywords (match type, etc.) going to the EXACT same landing page (this was direct-linking) and what we discovered was very interesting and should be disheartening for anyone considering buying the the Arbitrage Conspiracy:

His minimum bids we’re often between .50 to $1.00 per click while MINE for the EXACT same set up were between .15 – .30 per click!

In other words, it appears that Account History has a fairly major impact on bid prices in some (maybe many) cases.

Now, you can certainly build up a great account history – but that means that you’ll probably have to WAIT until you can pull off some of the more profitable tricks such as the one “revealed” in the free Arbitrage Conspiracy training…(I’m not sure why I keep using “revealed” for that domains as keywords trick – it’s almost like saying I’ve just discovered “THE INTERNET”).

So I wouldn’t call Arbitrage Conspiracy a scam, but I CANNOT recommend it – especially if you are not already an experienced marketer – and if you ARE then you’d probably know everything in the course from what I’m hearing from people like Jerry West.

To be notified when his full review of the Arbitrage Conspiracy is live sign up for his newsletter.

I guess the one thing I would leave you with is – if you STILL plan to buy The Arbitrage Conspiracy system then look for a bonus or bonuses that cover one or all of the following:

How to manage a huge volume of CPA offers.

How to manage start and end dates of CPA offers.

How to build a CPA affiliate “team”.

Strategies for establishing a high-quality Adwords Account

Update Dec 15th: I read through the full free report that was given out and it was incredibly disappointing. Not only was it “below basic level” they had the audacity to call it a “game-changing report”. That stinks.

In fact you can learn more valuable information from reading the sales letter. I think the only realistic thing for you to do if you are considering this course is to hook up with someone who has more detailed knowledge about it than most of the affiliates I’ve seen seem to have.

The main person I’m recommending you ask questions to is James Schramko as not only does he know what he’s doing when it comes to online marking, but he also has worked with Aymen AND Nikhil Parekh closely.

Comments

Very Interesting… I was impressed enough with the apparent integrity, the ‘return to those who have given so much’ tone that I was following and expecting to get on board. And yes, I’m new to web marketing but technically adept enough to think I could accomplish any of the myriad tasks necessary to earn a living in this realm.
Thanks for your views, I’m delighted to hear from an expert not wholly drawn in to this highly-hyped program!

Well blow me down,I was almost ready to sign up and thanks to your information I am holding on to my horses, after all I have no idea about Internet marketing but would love to learn the honest way. This sounded like a rip off anyway.Thanks again.
John from UK

You say “because if they do NOT cover one VITAL aspect of running CPA marketing – and that is keeping track of a huge inventory of CPA offer start and end dates and having an automatic way of starting a new offer when one expires you are going to go completely nuts.”

One of the MANY reasons I am excited about having bought Abitrage Conspiracy is that I intend to learn how to test and track and keep track of many offers.

Learning that alone will make the course worth 2 grand.

You are right in the sense that this COULD be a major problem for people who try to scale up buying cheap traffic. And that’s why this course and the people behind it are appealing to me.

They know things that you or I don’t know. Otherwise how could they make 50 to 100 k net per day???

There is no disputing that is what these 3 uys are making. They’ve verified wit with people I know and trust AND other people I know – know them. They really are masters at this game.

As for Jerry West – I really have respected him… but I am really disappointed in him – he walked out after 40 minutes – so he didn’t see it all – also – that seminar was NOT the 12 week course – it was to get people excited at the possibilities of buying cheap traffic and converting offers into money – not train the attendees HOW to do it! People who were there that got excited did so because they kneow enough to know that these guys were for real and that what they do works for them – if a littl emagic can rub off – that’s good!

Also – it was irresponsible for Jerry to say don’t buy it and instead he’ll have free course on CPA soon or something like that….

Sure – it’s nice that he’ll have a CPA course for free. I’ll gladly look at it, but this Arbitrage thing is far more than teaching what CPA is. Since we don’t know the secrets they’ll reveal – NO ONE can say it will or won’t be worth it.

If they can teach me how to manage many campaigns and weed out the duds with good tracking and stats analysis – I’ll be thrilled!

Now that said – this course is not for everyone – but in my case – it’s exactly what I need and want at this pointfor me personally – so I am looking forward to learning something from people who are already successful doing what I hope to do myself!

I’ve been thinking about this and will be curious as to how it all shakes out.

I saw my friend and one of my main mentors Nikhil Parekh (who as I recall I think you’ve worked with?) gave it a recommendation – although as he usually does he told people not to lose focus of their long-term business plan and suggested using the course for making fast cash.

The main complaint I’ve seen so far has been people getting slammed with unusable minimum bids.

As you know the key will be showing people how to THINK about harvesting keywords and how to automate as much of this as possible and possibly how to build a team to do the pieces that can’t be automated.

I suppose I was lucky to have hooked up with Nikhil at a time when he was just starting out – so if you get that same type of knowledge in a way that gets you to take action I’d say that’s certainly worth a lot.

I don’t recall if he’s offering a bonus – but if someone IS going to buy the course I’d have a hard time thinking of someone to get a bonus through than Nikhil as he usually provides bonuses that compliment the products well – and if I’m right that you did some work with him or still are…well, I think that puts you in much different (and better) position than most people buying the course.

However, anyone who is offering a bonus is welcome to list them here in the comments section – I would only ask that they explain how their bonus will compliment the course to make the Arbitrage Conspiracy experience better for the buyer.

I really should have prefaced my opinion with – “take what I say with a grain of salt as I am not IN the course” but I have subscribers I have watch out for based on talking to them every day – and really the advice was geared more towards them based on my knowledge of their typical skill level.

Although come to think of it – you mention it’s a 12-week course that nobody recommending or NOT recommending it had seen when they recommended it or did NOT recommend it.

So how is Jerry West’s review (which he stated in his full review was also based on several of his friends staying through to the end) any different than people RECOMMENDING the 12-week course that they haven’t seen?

Or did the JV partner’s get a full outline with more details? The reviews I saw didn’t reflect that.

One thing in Jerry’s review I found a bit odd was the information about taking a long time to get paid – as I’ve always been able to negotiate much SHORTER payout cycles once I hit a certain volume level – often as short as weekly – but certainly bi-monthly. Although maybe his point was to make sure people knew there were cash-flow considerations and that successful people will need to be able to establish large lines of credits (certainly not a bad problem to have).

One thing Jerry hinted at was that there was some sort of continuity program involved with this which I haven’t verified or ruled out at this point. Do you know?

OK, Mike I did update my opinion (you’re right, “REVIEW” isn’t the right word) with a preface based on your feedback – something I really screwed up when I put that up and should have done to begin with.

But about your comment about Jerry West – what I’m saying is you said:

“Sure – it’s nice that he’ll have a CPA course for free. I’ll gladly look at it, but this Arbitrage thing is far more than teaching what CPA is. Since we don’t know the secrets they’ll reveal – NO ONE can say it will or won’t be worth it.”

But you also said:

“As for Jerry West – I really have respected him… but I am really disappointed in him – he walked out after 40 minutes – so he didn’t see it all”

Jerry West covered this when he sent his full reason for not recommending the course (you’re right: ‘review’ is the wrong word):

“As I said in my opening piece on my Blog, I was there for Aymen’s video seminar and I walked out of the room after about 40 minutes due to the sheer basics of the lecture. I had better things to do that day … like take a nap. So how can I say it was garbage when I walked out so early? I had many friends who stayed to the end and my business partner stayed too. All hoped it would get better, and it didn’t. So I know everything that was discussed.”

In other words almost everyone HAS to base their recommendations or non-recommendations of the Arbitrage Conspiracy course on that live event which seems to be what Jerry West did.

Now, I’m not sure if you’re saying that you agree with the people who ENDORSED the course.

But I don’t see how people ENDORSING the course are different than Jerry West who did NOT endorse the course as ultimately it sounds like they are basing their recommendations on the SAME information.

So I didn’t understand how can you be disappointed in Jerry West and not disappointed in the people who recommended the course if you are upset that reviews/recommendations aren’t given based on the actual course?

I CAN see how you’d be upset with MY recommendation to my list and I definitely made a mistake by not prefacing it with the fact that I wasn’t at the event so take it with a “grain of salt”.

Someone that knows Aymen well – like it seems Nikhil does – that might be a different story as he likely has more details. I believe the two of them have known each other for quite some time.

Don’t confuse the SEMINAR which was FREE with the 12 week training which COSTS 2 grand :’>

I could care less about the seminar – or the all star call – or any endorsements – that’s not why I bought Arbitrage Conspiracy and NOT what I based my decision on.

They did that stuff to build hype. And it worked rather well too. But so what!

I did not buy Arbitrage Conspiracy because of the hype or any endorsements. No one has seen the material for the 12 week course – so how would they know whether it’s good or not???

If you ask me – I think the reason why some people are so sour about this Arbitrage Conspiracy thing is because they don’t like the hype… or the fact that Brad Fallon did it again. Brad managed to get every major player in a room to hear about his new product launch and the thing took over the internet for the past week.

It appears to be rubbing some people the wrong way. Some people hate when others succeed!

Ahhh… that’s what it is!

I just wish you guys would NOT confuse the hype and massive jv promotions with what the product is offering. It looks pretty good to me (if you can make it past the endorsements!)

Have you even read the sales page to see what they will be teaching over the next 12 weeks??? Or did you get upset by all those endorsements and run the other way before you saw the product details???

It’s funny – but the slam talk centers around everything BUT what the product actually offers!

If they can deliver all that stuff they promise – I will be happy to spend 2 grand for it!

I looked at the facts and verified whether this Aymen guy was real and then decided it was a good investment.

If you or anyone is basing judgement of what the course will be on what Jerry saw for 40 minutes and then bailed on so he could do better things, like take a nap, then I think you’re basing your opinion on feelings and not facts. Product facts – not seminars or hype.

My whole point is – ALL THE PEEPS who feel obligated to slam this Arbitrage Conspiracy product (which is a 12 week course no one has seen yet) – has made their RASH comments based on the FREE SEMINAR and theOVERWHELMING PROMOTIONS.

I don’t care about the seminar. I am not buying the seminar. That was given away for free.

I did not base my buying decision on the seminar – or any 3rd party “endorsement” – I based my decison on product features, facts and on PROOF and VALIDATION. I looked at what I could potentially learn from Aymen and decided it was a smart investment.

You have the right to NOT buy it – or even think it’s not good – but you can’t honestly predict WHAT I WILL GET is not worth it – you simply don’t know – NOR DO I!

That’s why it’s an INVESTMENT. It’s an educated guess!

I am willing to “invest” 2 grand to find out if this Aymen guy is for real and see if in 12 weeks I can learn things that will help me make more money. I have no problem with that. I can write it off on my taxes :’>

If I did not believe I would get enough VALUE to make my investment back – I wouldn’t do it.

OK. Now it’s starting to look like you’re not even reading what I’m writing.

1) I already stated that the seminar is NOT the course many times. So how you came to the conclusion that “I don’t get it that the seminar is not the course” is baffling.

However, I did re-read the sales letter and either I missed a couple pieces at the end or it was added after the first time I read it…probably I missed it.

And those are two pieces that address a couple of my concerns – how to build a team to scale which is critical – and how to outsource.

2) I already stated that SOME people may have researched on their own. You’re right – I initially thought that you bought the course based on an endorsement which is why at the time I didn’t understand why you were disappointed in Jerry for making a non-recommendation even though he left after 40 minutes.

So I think what I hear you saying is that ANYONE recommending or NOT recommending the course should have tried to get to know Aymen better and find out more about the course before making a non-recommendation of the course.

I guess the issue there would be whether the people promoting the course WERE given any detailed outline about what the course would cover other than just the “sales page” and the videos which really don’t give enough detail to make a recommendation or non-recommendation.

Because in my opinion – if you’re going to ask someone to promote your product you need to give them as much access as possible – unless your saying that even AYMEN himself doesn’t know the details enough to share them with his JV partners – which I’d find a bit hard to believe.

3) As far as ME being jealous of Brad Fallon – which you seem to be implying by saying “you guys” – I’ve bought a lot from the Stomper guys – Stompernet for 10 months, SMARTS, and the original StompeNet course. And I’ve bought other products that they recommended, including Jeff Johnson’s SuperAffiliateCoachingClub which has been perfect for where my partner and I have been taking our business – we literally would have been stuck for months without that training.

I think Brad and Andy are brilliant and I’ve received tremendous value from them and made huge leaps in my business from studying with them (and also learned what B.S. to avoid).

In fact, I’m planning to join Stomper AGAIN but i needed to take my business to another level before it made sense to do that. THEY were a huge part of HOW I learned to take my business to the level it’s gotten to and how to get to where I want it to go.

4) I actually recently wrote about why I think hype exists in the home business (and IM) markets and how come even the best products almost HAVE to keep using hype here about a week or so ago:

Anybody know what format the program is offered in? Online training, DVD, Downloadable PDF, video??? Can you see all of the training at once or is it delivered over 12 weeks? Email me at jajaip (at) gmail if you are interested in splitting up the cost of this training.

The Arbitrage Conspiracy free report tells you, in general terms, that you can pay for PPC (pay per click, like Google AdWords) to promote your affiliate landing pages offered by CPA (Cost per Acquisition) Companies, and the “arbitrage” part comes from the difference between your investment (what you had to spend in PPC) and your prize (what the CPA companies pay you for the action made by the visitor you sent).

Then, the idea is that if you find a successful combination (PPC –> CPA) then you would add up some leverage, investing more and more into that profitable one. I understand that it is apparently proved that this guy makes over between $50K and $100K every day, so he must really know what he’s doing. The price of the full 12 week course is $1997.

I dropped by to say thanks for the bonus recommendation and also to say you have raised some great points.

In particular the point about finding creative ways to harvest keywords and get traffic in different ways to the competition. This is a great way to get low prices and high payouts.

The other thing you mentioned that I liked a lot was the suggestion that you can make your own deals and terms. There is a lot of dealing in this neck of the woods and it will suit someone who likes that.

It is not for total new marketers and I have suggested this to readers as well.

I am doing the course with students and after going over the course blueprint in detial I am really looking forward to it.

The course and the material should be the focus for people. There are as many biased naysayers as there are supporters. Some of the people who put the course (which they have not seen) down are putting out their own.

If we’re someone’s going to buy the course we want them to buy it from someone with a bit more knowledge about the course than just what was at the seminar AND we want to make sure it’s going to be from someone we know will actually care about what they get out of the course.

As I mentioned our initial recommendation was really geared towards our subscribers who often know nothing at all about internet marketing and are just getting started out the gate.

I can’t go into the details but we’ve been working for a year on a system to do large-scale non-ppc way to do CPA offers in a very automated way so we definitely see the potential.

I am also building multiple traffic systems to feed my own network of sites and this gives great insulation from the ups and downs of paid traffic sources.

Paid sources are much faster and I agree with you this is a field that people with zero knowledge should be extremely cautious with due to the level of competition and the downside risk of getting it wrong.

A few dollars invested in learning about PPC through training courses can be a smart investment that saves a bundle of wasted marketing.